LIVE FROM GSMA MOBILE ASIA CONGRESS 2011:  Participants in the mobile app industry this morning discussed the potential for HTML5-based apps to ease some of the pain points in the industry, while also noting that the technology itself is not without its challenges.

Speaking in an App Planet session, Thibaut Rouffineau (pictured), VP of partnerships at Wireless Industry Partnership, noted that for a technology where the main selling point is the removal of fragmentation, this is currently something of an issue for HTML5 itself. “How many flavours of HTML5 are there? Everyones’s got an HTML5 framework nowadays. I could create one tomorrow,” he noted.

Acknowledging that “the reality is that apps are becoming more like the web,” he also said that the web itself is becoming more app-like. “Who nowadays would launch a portal website? This is not that time. Now it’s about very small websites that do one thing properly. These two worlds are getting together.”

However, this also means that there is a significant shift in business models for developers. “You can’t really make money from selling apps anymore. So you have to do like the web guys do – make money from advertising,” Rouffineu argued.

Inman Breaux, VP of publisher relations and business development at AirPush, noted that: “It’s really about finding that combination between web and mobile, because you can only go so far. Apps are always going to be needed to realise the native function of the phone, whether it’s a certain geo permission or the camera.”

However, Breaux also noted that developers have bigger issues to worry about: “It’s really about monetisation, and whether that’s going to be through a freemium model, which works depending on how the app is; in-app advertising, if you have a ton of installs and users; or other innovative units such as push notification ads or search monetisation. All are different things to consider when trying to create a stable business model.”

Bess Ho, mobile architect with investment firm Archimides Ventures, advised the audience that simplification has definite benefits for mobile development. “If you have a portfolio of apps, I would advise you to consolidate your source code and leverage a framework to reduce your overhead, to make the maintenance easier and to make the release cycle faster,” she said.